


the hollow hill

by elftrash



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Canonical Character Death, Gen, but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:29:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25999789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elftrash/pseuds/elftrash
Summary: The bridge is not built. The people of Nargothrond do not go out to fight in the open, to die together. Their long battle remains one of shadow-play, of knives in the night, of unseen hosts glimpsed and then gone.Turin continues to speak in council, but Orodreth listens to the loudest voice. He always has. Finduilas makes sure that that voice is hers.
Relationships: Finduilas Faelivrin/Gwindor, Finduilas Faelivrin/Niënor Níniel, Finduilas Faelivrin/Túrin Turambar
Comments: 24
Kudos: 59
Collections: CAILURE EXCHANGE 2020





	the hollow hill

**Author's Note:**

> _Now is this golden crown like a deep well_   
>  _That owes two buckets, ﬁlling one another,_   
>  _The emptier ever dancing in the air,_   
>  _The other down, unseen and full of water._

The spear is a lance of ice piercing her through. There’s no pain yet, not until Finduilas takes a breath and feels something inside her snag on its wicked barbs; tear.

Then nothing.

-

She draws another gasping breath.

-

_What lies beyond, for the First of the Children?_

Her great-uncle, the first king of Nargothrond, had liked to ask that question. It had not filled him with the great, gulping fear of the other Exiles, who feared the ineluctable return of their fëa to Mandos. They had passed him, after all, as he stood before them on the road, and heard his dread words, and had neither stopped or stayed. They did not know how much of what had once been promised to the Eldar would be denied them for their disobedience, or for how long they would spend in Mandos’s halls. They did not think they could bear to look on his face again.

And they feared to die.

The Elves of Nargothrond feared death and pain and loss so greatly that they brought it down on them all the sooner. Hiding in their hollow hill, in their Dwarf-delved halls, they let Finrod Felagund their king go almost alone into the dark, and lost him. 

They did not leave their halls for the muster of their High King.

They fought the Dark with slyness and silence, with stealth and ambush and secret arrow. They held their own. They feared to die, and they feared to live, and they feared to leave.

And then – 

-

Nothing.

-

Nothing hurts.

Finduilas opens her eyes and sees only darkness. It takes moments for that darkness to resolve into something more familiar, and in those moments she seems to hear her father, not King Finrod.

_What if there is no life for us left but this? Slain we may be, and slain we will be, they said, and long after we are slain will we abide houseless of spirit and long regretting. We have been denied our immortality. If there is no life for us left but this, ought we not husband it as long as we might?_

But she is not unhoused. She is flesh, and she is spirit; she is Finduilas. Her hands are her own, their shape as familiar to her as ever. 

She is in her room in Nargothrond once more.

When she rises from her bed, her body betrays no stiffness of new use or long sleep. Her silver-gold hair swings down over her shoulder in a single great braid such as she might have wrought herself for sleeping. Her silky wrapper is the pale green of new leaves, soft and shapeless, as familiar to her as the room. 

There are her slippers by the bedside with their pointed toes, not quite aligned, as though she had stepped out of them only a day before.

This room is gone. She knows this. These things are gone. Nargothrond fell in fire, and Finduilas was taken by the Orcs. By the time the spear went through her to meet the tree at her back, the shock of it driving into the wood vibrating through her flesh, all she had known for weeks and days was filth and welts and dirt.

Now, as she steps into her shoes, the scent of fresh rushes and gathered grasses crushed underfoot rises from the ground to perfume the air.

Someone knocks at her door.

“My lady. My lady.”

Would those who wait upon Mandos be so meek?

“My lady? You are wanted. Two strangers have been taken up by our scouts in their watch, and they have begged leave to look upon your face.”

This, too, is familiar. She has heard this before.

Finduilas opens the door. 

She had dressed with more state, the first time. She had taken up and tied her golden girdle at her waist, and she had put on an outer gown of richer stuff. She had followed the chamberlain through the winding halls with her mind full of confusion, wondering who waited, and knowing the answer would not, could not be he who she had so long hoped for. 

She had been wrong about that.

She is dreaming now, but it is nevertheless sweet to walk these halls again, to walk under the vaulted stone once more, even in memory; to pass the thick pillars with their strange carvings older than the Exile. In the heavy sunken niches left behind by that earlier race of Dwarves, frail things of Elven-make glow, picked out by lighting from the shadows: delicate carvings, jewelled designs, soft tapestries depicting idle lives lived in a lost light Finduilas herself has never seen. Among them are mechanical wonders of Celebrimbor’s make, tolling the hours in the darkness for an underground people who rarely walk in the Sun.

All lost. All gone. They were not what she grieved for, these things, precious as they were.

“My lady,” says the chamberlain, bowing her in. 

The Great Hall had long been a room full of ghosts. Finrod Felagund had ruled here, a silver crown on his golden head, and jewels had gleamed on each of his fingers save one. He had presided over so many audiences and so many feasts. After the fall of Tol Sirion, Finduilas had sat at his right, the lady of his halls, in the seat he had once meant for his sister.

Beren Camlost had stood here, a man of the woods with his dark hair shaggy about his shoulders and his face burned brown. He had been roughly dressed, but on his hand he had worn a ring set with a great green stone.

The Sons of Fëanor had stood in this hall with their proud heads held high, dark Curufin and fair Celegorm, shade and blade. The blade had glittered dangerously in the light, but the shade had crept into corners and minds and hearts, poisoning and blackening, freezing hearts with fear. 

Lúthien Tinúviel, her dark hair cropped around her shapely head like a thrall, but that head yet held like a queen’s.

The clustering ghosts in the Great Hall now are too thick, too real, too fleshy.

“Finduilas,” says Orodreth her father. Alive, alive, the silver crown back on his brow. “These – _Men_ – wish to speak to you.”

“Lady,” says dead Gwindor, alive, alive, and it sounds like a whispered prayer winging its way to Elbereth. 

He had not begged, the first time, when this was real. He had not asserted his identity. He had not pressed anything upon her. He had only fixed her with his eyes, still brilliant in his weary, sunken face, a familiar landmark in a strange map, and waited for his fate.

Túrin says nothing. 

Túrin had said nothing the first time, either. Túrin had stood there, a stark contrast to her ruined and tortured lover, in the morning of his beauty and his youth. The fairest Man, they had said, to be found in Beleriand, as lovely as an Elf; yet steeped in bitter sorrow beyond his years. His thick dark hair had fallen _so_ across his brow, as though in need of combing, or gentle fingers to push it from his brow. His white brow had creased _so_ , as though he was thinking always of some tragic, painful hope, or brooding on some wrong. His lovely, rather sulky, mouth – 

Túrin.

He is looking at her now but not seeing her, Finduilas. He is looking at her like she is a lovely stranger. He has never seen her before.

He had not looked at her as the Orcs had taken her., He had not moved as they had taken the other women and girls of Nargothrond. She had cried, and she had called to him, and he had stood there with his sword loose in his hand and not answered.

“Finduilas,” says her father. “ _Do_ you know these Men?”

If she said no, would the scouts of the Nargothrondrim take the two once more to the plains and let them go, to find their way where they would? Or would they take them into the dark and cut their throats, and leave their bodies in the depthless shafts where Dwarves once dug? 

She might see Túrin call for help as she had called, and watch him learn, too, that no help would come. 

Nargothrond would not fall in this dream if she did not recognise them. It would not lower its guard or unveil its face. It would stay safe beneath the earth, and her father would live, and innumerable Elf-knights and gentle ladies would live also, and not be slain.

And Gwindor –

“Finduilas,” says her father. 

In this hall, Finrod Felagund had looked at a wild man and seen in him the features of Bëor he had loved, of the house he had long fostered. He had looked at him and seen a debt, when every grain of sense had likely counselled, _no, no –_

She meets Gwindor’s eyes. There are many lines around them. It had hurt her so much before to look on his worn face and remember the beautiful Elf-knight who had gone to answer the High King’s call.

It hurts even more now. 

“This is Gwindor of Nargothrond,” she says, and watches a few of the deep lines at his brow and mouth soften, his eyes burn brighter. “One of our own kind, one of our own. Take your blades from him.” 

-

She does not wake from the dream.

Night follows day, and day follows night.

Could even Irmo weave such solid shapes, such thick feeling, such stone beneath her fingers and ground beneath her feet?

Finduilas pricks herself very calmly with one of her needles, driving it deep into the fleshy pad of her forefinger until it reaches the bone. It hurts. It bleeds. It is nothing, compared to the spear.

She repeats the experiment at intervals with each of her fingers in turn, each morning. The results do not vary.

Her dead great-uncle would have enjoyed such a problem. He would have enjoyed such questions. Oh, he would have felt for her, for her pain, for her confusion, for her barbed memories! But she can imagine him lacing together his long fingers in a lattice of starry gems and thinking deeply. 

_Why do you assume_ , asks the Finrod Felagund in her head, _that this is the dream, and that was your life? Would it not be wiser to assume that this is your life, and that the dream? You have been sleeping, and now you wake. You have been given much to see, but to see further is in the manner of our line, daughter of the house of Finarfin. If this is reality, and not dream, what will you do with that knowledge?_

-

She sees to Gwindor’s wounds herself. She gains a knowledge of his flesh she had once thought to have when they were married. There are deep galled bands of scarring and scabs around his wrists. There are lash-scars on his back, curling around his shoulders and his hips and his ribs. The ribs themselves are very stark. He is so very thin. 

She is the lady of Nargothrond: no queen, but these halls have never had a queen. She bakes bread with her own hands for him to eat and in it is much virtue. He begins, slowly, to put on flesh.

She is not a great healer, but she aids those who are, and works in the stillroom, and helps in seeing that wounds are salved and blotted and cleaned. Gwindor responds better to her touch than to theirs.

“Faelivrin,” he says, his silver head cradled in her lap one afternoon. His hair was black once. “It cannot be undone.”

Her fingers still in his hair. 

“I am aged,” says Gwindor, his voice so different from what it had been, “as never one of the Eldar should be. I have been broken by unkind hands, and yours cannot restore me.”

He had not spoken to her of this before. She never asked for her freedom the first time, and when he pressed it on her it had been unsought, if not unwished for.

She will never ask. Had Finrod Felagund turned from Bëor as he aged and withered? Could she do less? 

She had never been able to grieve the first time. It had seemed ungrateful when he who she had plighted troth with had been returned to her beyond hope, when life itself was still present. Who could mourn for what was lost when so much had been given, unlooked for?

Who could not?

“You are Gwindor still,” she says. It is true, and it means much.

“I am,” he says. “And therefore I love you still, daughter of the house of Finarfin. I will love you to the end of the Music.”

These are words she has heard before. 

“And because I love you,” Gwindor says, steadily, “I will not bind you; I will not let you bind yourself where it is no longer mete or proper for you to do so. I am no husband for you any longer, Finduilas Faelivrin, and that is something that cannot be denied. I will not wed morning to evening, or health to sickness, or age to youth. It is Morgoth that has wrought this, and not you, and not I; but wrought it he has, and we cannot pretend he has not.”

These words she has never heard.

Gwindor had not spoken of it, and Finduilas had not either. They had avoided those truths and each other. All around them the people of Nargothrond had tried too to pretend that Gwindor was still the knight who had left those halls, and not the ruin that had returned. They had dressed him in rich garb, and done him much honour, and called him one of the wise, and put him at her father’s left as one of his councillors. They had not held a wedding feast. They had not begun plans for one. But they had not ended their betrothal, and Finduilas had not removed the silver ring Gwindor had put on her finger. 

_Let no grief lie between us_ , Gwindor had said in that other life when he let her go. But there _is_ grief between them. There had been grief between them then, and that grief had not been Túrin’s doing alone.

Their shared grief, their shared loss. What Morgoth did to them. 

It feels like something has broken in her, something long frozen thawed. As though a lance has found her heart, Finduilas begins to weep, and in her lap Gwindor’s tears slowly seep into the green of her gown and run over her fingers where she has cupped his cheek.

They mourn together for a long time before Finduilas dries his face with one of her long sleeves, careful of each line and furrow marking his skin; before Gwindor takes her hand and presses his lips to the silver ring on her finger and then draws it free.

-

Túrin she _will_ not look at, day after day. She is the lady of Nargothrond, and there is no reason for her to wait upon this mortal remnant of Bëor’s long line as she did the first time. It was wrong of her to spend so much time with him then, to seek him out, to walk in halls where she was likely to meet him and fall into talk. He is only a child, one of the Secondborn: a moth to briefly unfurl his soft-petalled wings, to fall.

She tells herself that. She will not look at him. 

Túrin, who she had loved, or thought she loved. Whose dark tousled hair she had longed to brush from his brow, whose sad face she had wanted to take in her hands, to lay against her breast and cradle until his fierce poignant sorrow ceased.

Does she blame him? 

This Túrin is not yet that Túrin. That Túrin had not helped her, or those with her, her charge: the women, the children, the innocents. She watched so many of them sicken and die during their shared torment among the Orcs. But as the Orcs led them away, Túrin had been staring fixedly into the great golden eyes of a coiled fire-drake, and what fell web had caught him she could not guess. That there was a snare of some kind she knew; and could she blame him for that, who had gone blundering like a wounded bird into the net of her own doom when she looked first on his face?

But those were not the only deaths she had seen before she died herself. The knights of Nargothrond had given up their secret arts, their silent battles in the shadows. They had gone forth in might to face the Dark Enemy, because Túrin had wished it so; and in their bright ranks they had died.

Túrin had called shame on their stealth and spoken of deeds done in the light. He had shouted down Gwindor in council, spoken over him, and been listened to, despite all the golden chains of state looped around Gwindor’s stooped shoulders by Elves terrified by the cold breath of mortality and longing to make it better. 

He had played, without knowing, upon the long unhealed wounds of Finrod Felagund’s death, and driven Nargothrond into an orgy of shame-fuelled desire, yearning to requite the past with a show of strength, to hold nothing back at last, to go together into the flame.

In those last months, as the bridge was built, her father had looked less weary, less guilty, than since his uncle’s death. Finduilas had loved him, and feared for him, and still never felt as safe or as merry with him as king as she had in Finrod’s day.

Wrestling with her own guilt and shame, she had not been sure then which was the right path: she had not been certain enough in her own mind to speak, either aye or nay. But to Túrin she too had listened.

She knows now.

-

“This bridge idea is _extremely_ stupid,” says Finduilas, lady of Nargothrond, daughter of Orodreth, daughter of the house of Finarfin, rising to address the council. “Turning to open war with an enemy so much stronger than us is short-sightedness itself.”

“Finduilas!” says her father, shocked. But he leans towards her nonetheless. He likes a strong opinion; he likes to draw on other people’s sense of assurance, to fill his own hollow doubt with them. 

Túrin’s mouth forms, briefly, a perfect O. Has no one ever told him before that an idea of his was stupid? Perhaps in Doriath the King and the Maia Queen had only made much of him, their human foster-son, wishing to encourage him in all he said and did.

“My lady,” he says, rallying. “I beg your pardon; but there is greater honour to be found in brave strokes and battle in the open than in secret ways and cowering under the earth.”

“Agarwean, son of Úmarth,” says Finduilas. She has not spent enough time with him this time to have come to call him _Thurin_ , and Gwindor has not told her in secret this time his true name. She must call him instead by the tragical name he claimed for himself, and which once she had found darkly glamorous. Now it only makes her feel sad and rather tired, like looking on a toy of childhood long abandoned, but once treasured. “I wonder you make that argument, when you do your own deeds under the guise of a dwarf-helm, and when you pass here under a name I cannot believe any mother would give her child.”

“Oh, you would be surprised,” Túrin mutters, his words steeped in darkness.

It is then she remembers that his mother had named her last-born Sorrow.

-

The bridge is not built. The people of Nargothrond do not go out to fight in the open, to die together. Their long battle remains one of shadow-play, of knives in the night, of unseen hosts glimpsed and then gone.

Túrin continues to speak in council, but Orodreth listens to the loudest voice. He always has. Finduilas makes sure that that voice is hers.

On the occasions she meets Túrin’s eyes, she finds him looking at her with a kind of bewildered betrayal, pretty mouth turned down at the corners and his dark brows drawn together.

-

Messengers come to them. Angrod’s people, or Angrod’s people-that-were; another lost great-uncle, one that Finduilas knew only a little in the time before the Flame. Their names are Gelmir and Arminas, and when they are announced Gwindor goes pale.

Finduilas rises from her chair to stand behind his, and lays her hand upon his shoulder. There is love between them still. She will love him as long as she is Finduilas. 

It is only a name. It is not only a name. 

“My lord,” says this Gelmir who isn’t Gwindor’s Gelmir, but like enough to him in his Noldor colouring, “we bring news from the Lord of the Waters.”

Orodreth leans forward in his chair. Finrod’s silver crown slips a little on his brow. It’s never quite fit him, for all Celebrimbor’s tinkering. “Oh? And what does he say; and why does one of the Valar speak to us?”

The message is very clear. It is not the message Finduilas remembers. Then, the words had come as warning, and almost, perhaps already, too late. _Lord of Nargothrond_ , they had said then, _Shut the doors of the fortress and go not abroad. Cast the stones of your pride into the loud river, that creeping evil might not find the gate._

Now Gelmir of dead Dorthonion says, “Lord – lady – of Nargothrond, I am bid tell you: your time for dwelling safely under hill is almost at an end, for the poison that defiles the springs of the Sirion will in time taint all that touches it. The virtue in those waters can be found now only near the shores of the Sea. If you are wise, you will withdraw also; and love not too much the bright treasures of your halls, for these you may not have and live.”

For a moment, her father looks frightened. Finduilas remembers his fright. She remembers how he answered these heralds the first time, when it was the bridge they bade him destroy, and how Túrin had stood, proud and stern, and said it would not be so.

Her father had looked to him like drooping ivy yearning for a column to throw itself around, and when he had found the reassurance he sought in Túrin, Orodreth’s naked fear had clothed itself in angry pride.

There is no bridge this time, and Finduilas will not let Túrin be the first to speak. 

-

Deep in Nargothrond’s halls are its forges, Elven now but Dwarven once. They are not somewhere Finduilas often ventured, in the first life that was perhaps a dream. 

She still pricks her fingers each morning.

“My lady!” says Celebrimbor, blinking. He draws back into the shadows as though she has brought too bright a light into his dark habitation.

The last time she had seen him in her first life, he had been fighting a desperate retreat, giving cover to the fleeing wounded, to warriors and civilians. She hadn’t seen the end of that fight. She had died hoping that he had saved some of them, something of Nargothrond: even a remnant of a remnant.

She hadn’t known what Celebrimbor thought the first time of Túrin’s great plan. He had helped with the planning and building of the bridge, but how much that had been his will, and how much his allegiance to her father? 

Celebrimbor flinched from all association with his father and with his uncle, with their brief dark hour of power. Therefore he might have felt Túrin spoke wisely because what he counselled had been so different from that they had. But he might have felt as Gwindor did, who had fought in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears and learned that open might would avail naught against the Dark Enemy; yet if Celebrimbor had, he would never have spoken. He had gone quiet after Curufin and Celegorm were driven out, shade and blade; he had stayed in the shadows, and never raised his voice to speak in the councils around the throne.

They are almost strangers. They had scarcely spoken in all the long years after Finrod Felagund went away and never came back. He _looks_ so much like his father. He reminds everyone of a painful time they all wish to forget, a guilt they wish to pretend was not their own. 

“My lady?” says Celebrimbor again. He is not dressed as a prince of the house of Finwë in his battered leathers, his soot. There are no jewels on his hands, and only a little braided silver in his dark hair. _Don’t look at me_ , says his clothing, _I am no prince._ His strong arms and clever fingers say _I am useful, I will be useful to you_. Nargothrond’s treasures are a strange jumble. There is peerless art from the land they lost, the land they left, carried by the Finarfinians over the Ice. And there are the brilliant new things, wrought by Celebrimbor in the shadows to make their life under the earth full of pleasant music and loveliness, things of great use and power. 

“Cousin,” says Finduilas. 

He has been making a sword, rather than something beautiful, but there is beauty in it, in its long clean lines and as yet undecorated hilt. 

Watching her, Celebrimbor sets it aside. “You have not called me that in some time.”

If she was Túrin, Finduilas would mutter, _longer even than you think_ , and scowl into the distance, brooding on her tragic, inscrutable past. Instead, refusing the temptation of melodrama, she says merely, “Then it has been too long.”

“What is it that you want from me – cousin?” 

-

All is nearly in order for the retreat when more petitioners are encountered on the Watchful Plain and shepherded into the depths of Nargothrond. Much evidence of good faith must have been vouchsafed to their scouts, to bring them so far without challenge or question.

“I rather thought we were meant to be a _secret_ society,” says Gwindor as the council readies itself for their reception, a little glint of light in his eye.

“The Lord of the Waters has _personally assured_ us that we remain so, for now,” says Finduilas.

“And the Valar are never wrong, of course.”

She laughs; but she won’t agree out loud. There is a fragile compact light as air between her and them, even if no Vala has sworn it with their own sacred breath and given it perfumed shape. She means to hold them to it nevertheless. They owe her this: for a broken bridge, a way through the darkness. For a pierced heart, a mended one. For a spear – 

“Mablung of Doriath,” says the chamberlain. Túrin starts so palpably that Finduilas breaks the rule of months and weeks and turns to look at him; at his blanched cheeks and staring look. “And his men, doing Thingol’s bidding in escorting Morwen of Dor-lómin hence.”

“Morwen of Dor-lómin?” Orodreth asks. “There is no Dor-lómin any longer. For generations of Men, we fostered the house of Bëor; but it is blasted, all but one, and that last branch was plucked by Thingol’s daughter.”

Mablung of Doriath is a tall, handsome Sindar, with sharp cheekbones and sharper eyes. His mail coat is made up of overlapping leaf-shaped panels, dappled silver and brown and green like copper left to the tender mercies of the air. He is a moving forest in and of himself as he goes down on one knee before Orodreth, a living thing in the stony halls of Nargothrond where no sun shines. “Yet, lord, this lady is a sprig of that house; and she seeks another. Word reached my own lord that her son dwells here: Túrin, son of Húrin, of the house of Hador, but by the distaff side as much Bëor as Beren himself.”

His eyes lift to scan over the high table. They pass over Túrin, elf-beautiful and half concealed in shadow, as dark as a Noldor; move on, and then jerk back to him. 

“No Túrin dwells here,” says Orodreth again, a little querulous, but Gwindor is already laying a hand on his sleeve and leaning in to whisper otherwise in his ear. 

The woman standing among the Grey-elves of Doriath is a dark mirror Finduilas has gazed in before, it seems to her. It is Túrin’s face in woman’s form: a little softer, in some ways, but in others sharper. There is suffering eaten into this face like acid, a beauty as luminously ruined as the moon. The strong cheekbones are his, and the dark brows. Not the silver in the dark hair, though that might come, if Túrin lives long enough for it. 

It is her eyes that make Finduilas freeze: as large and as grey as his, but harder, piercing through the gloom as though to fix Túrin where he sits with a spear-like precision of their own. 

“Túrin?” says Morwen of ruined Dor-lómin to her son, and her rich voice has a crack in it, like silk with a snag. Morwen, who named one daughter Laughter, and the other Sorrow. 

“Túrin!” says Mablung of Doriath with satisfaction. Yet his gaze still wanders around the room, pulling back to Túrin, and then wandering again. “Túrin – where is Beleg? Why is he not with you?”

“Túrin,” says one of the Grey-elves, pushing back her hood. 

She is as bright-headed as a marigold, as a Vanya, as the songs say fair Indis was when Finwë looked at her and loved her. She is young. She is laughing a little, but Laughter sheis not.

\- 

“Fucking _Men_ ,” Mablung says into his hands. He has been left to Finduilas to console. The house of Hador, restored to one another, have been granted a little privacy in which to mend the hurts of long separation. Túrin had let himself be led away like one in a dream, staring first at mother and then at sister and then at mother again.

Finduilas does not mind his mouth when it makes an O in such soft surprise. There is a part of her heart that is still tender for him, that aches for him now in his joy. It is perhaps where the spear went through.

Still –

“ _Men_ ,” she agrees.

“I think you’re being a little hard on him,” Gwindor says, a loyal friend. 

Mablung rubs his hand over his face. “You did not know Beleg Unbegotten,” he says. “He walked beneath the stars by that lake from whence we all spring when the world was still dark. To die in _such_ a way! At _such_ a hand! I should drag him by his waving hair back to Thingol for sentencing.”

“You shouldn’t,” Gwindor says. “Or you wouldn’t; not if you saw how he grieved for Beleg, how he held him, how he kissed him and would scarcely let me take him from his arms. It was a sad mistake, and one born of ill-fortune and Morgoth’s evil. It was not his error.”

“I _could_ ,” says Mablung. He rubs his face again. “I could.”

He won’t.

Finduilas pours him more wine. She pours herself more, too. Then she tilts the silver ewer over Gwindor’s cup, for – even if he does not know it – he too has cause to drink to beauty, glory, love dead at Túrin’s careless hand. To curse the day Finrod first laid eyes on Bëor the Old, before he was truly old, and loved him, and pulled into curling embrace that fatal twining of their lines, snaking together down down into the dark.

-

“Is that wine? May I have some?” asks Túrin’s sister.

She is standing in Finduilas’s bed-chamber in her Doriath garb, made grey and brown when it was woven, and now greyer and browner from use and wear. Her bright hair is a tangle down her back. She is wearing men’s clothes and laughing as though she has found release a after long burden; as though she and not the lost sister had been called Lalaith at birth.

“A very little,” says Finduilas. “Do be careful, it’s rather strong.”

“I have drunk cordials at Thingol’s table,” says Niënor, Sorrow, Sister. “And Easterling gut-rot; but I prefer the former. And this – oh, it cannot be wine!”

“We make it from winter apples,” Finduilas says. She is the lady of Nargothrond. She is meant to be offering this guest fresh clothes and clear water, not plying her with drink. 

But ply she does. She will not refuse a kindness to a guest. She will not refuse this stranger anything, this sister as unlike Túrin as their mother is like. 

Dark and proud, beautiful and cold as frost is Morwen of the house of Bëor. The burned hand fears the flame and Finduilas flinched from Morwen as she has flinched from Túrin since the day she woke again in her own room. 

She would end, she had decided, that long strange song of her house, of Finarfin’s line and Bëor’s: Bëor who Finrod Felagund had loved. He had begun it.

Aegnor had taken up the torch, and moth-like Andreth had drawn near; and when the torch fell, Finrod had not let Andreth go so easily after him. Or perhaps it had been who held on; it had never been clear to Finduilas what lay between them, Aegnor’s never-wife and his brother.

Baragund, pulling Finrod from the Flame like a brand snatched from the fire, valuing his life above that of his own men. Beren, making an impossible demand impossible to deny, drawing Finrod into the dark. 

Finduilas of her first life, walking in those halls where Túrin was sure to be found, seeking his dark head among the shadows. 

Every Bëoring among them dark of hair and grey of eye, and fascinating as fly-paper. 

Niënor, Sorrow, is tall, and golden and blue-eyed. She is like no Bëoring Finduilas has ever met. She could not have imagined her, although once, in that life when they were close, Túrin had spoken to her of a lost sister, and painted her in Finduilas’s own form. 

“Tall and golden,” he had said, eyes on her face yet unseeing her. “A golden tree.”

He had not known then of the golden tree at the sacred heart of Elven myth, of lost Laurelin and its light; not until she told him. Yet he had said the words, gazing on Finduilas; and although he had spoken of sisters, and she of brothers, she had heard from his lips only the finest and fairest of compliments that could be given to one of the Eldar from their beloved, all the sweeter for its freshness.

“Let me get you fitter raiment,” Finduilas says now to Túrin’s sister, and, dream-like, helps golden Niënor remove her Doriath-garb, finds her a soft robe like her own; slippers. Brings her water in a golden bowl for her face and hands, water perfumed with violets. 

A comb. 

“Oh dear, it’s an awful tangle,” says Niënor, and throws it down when it snags in her hair. She makes a rueful face at Finduilas in the mirror, laughing a little.

Finduilas lifts the great mass of Niënor’s hair with her own white hands. With her fingers, she begins the long untangling. With the comb, she begins to work through the length of it. 

In the mirror, now and again, their eyes meet.

-

The people of Nargothrond obey the Lord of the Waters. As his blessing leaves the waters of Beleriand, his touch begins to fade from Sirion and from Gelion and from Narog. The shining waters of Ivrin sicken, where once Finduilas and Gwindor plighted troth, where once Turin bathed away the horror of finding Beleg dead at his own hand. The Elves of Nargothrond complete their own withdrawal as the rivers die, their path winding closely along the Narog until it joins the Sirion, then following the Sirion to where it meets the Sea, where the river water runs fresh again for a blessed while before it cleaves with the salt. 

They leave in shadow, in stealth, in small groups, one by one. There is no great going-forth, with trumpets blaring and banners flying. There is no great battle. There are only such parties of careful movers in the dark as Nargothrond has always been master of, small sorties slipping away and away and never coming back. Over weeks and days, Nargothrond’s great halls begin to fall quiet, its lights slowly go out, life and colour leaching from it with its people. In the niches, the treasures are left to rest forever, the implausible curiosities of Celebrimbor’s making that will mark the hours until the end of Beleriand itself: the fragile and wondrous things from Valinor that made it over the Ice when so many Noldor did not. 

Finduilas had wanted to be in the last party to leave. She had wanted to take a final leave of Nargothrond before it went quiet forever, to be the last foot to leave those halls. She had wanted to stand in Finrod’s great hall, and close her eyes, and remember the ghosts.

The dead, and the lost, and her memories of the people she has changed with her own will and sad foreknowledge, has wrought into different shapes, whose previous forms and first lives only she remembers.

But it is not her part.

“I wonder what you’ll find at the Mouth of the Sirion, cousin,” says Celebrimbor, who will lead the very last party instead. There have been whispers that he is not to be trusted, that – Fëanorian at the last – he will take empty Nargothrond for his own and rule there over the dust and among the treasures, lord over the jewels left behind. Finduilas knows better. She can remember Celebrimbor fighting a last desperate retreat, protecting fleeing Nargothrond elves with his strong arm.

“Nothing much, I think,” says Finduilas. Círdan is on Balar, they learned that much from Gelmir and Arminas. “A spit of sand, a handful of stone.”

“Well,” says Celebrimbor. He has been standing straighter since Finduilas appointed him to oversee the final party. _I am useful_ , says his bearing. “We _are_ Noldor. We like a challenge. Wait for me, and when I join you I will build you a fine fortress.”

-

Finduilas leads the first party to depart, not the last. They travel swiftly. They travel lightly. They follow the word of the Lord of the Waters, they follow the line of the Narog, and they follow her, the lady of Nargothrond. 

And she goes fiercely arrayed. In one hand she holds the bright shield Celebrimbor made for her at her asking, and in the other, a spear. This is the bargain she has made with the Valar, she thinks. For a pierced heart, a mended one. For a bitter loss, much saved. For the spear, a shield.

They name her for it, in later years, in Sirion: Gil-galad, the field of stars.

-

The story as Finduilas knew it ends when she breaks the chain of that fate. The river forks from there and goes wild. But there are things that must happen, things that cannot be changed, broken beads from that first broken necklace scattering and falling where they might:

Orodreth of Nargothrond is unable at the last to set aside Finrod’s crown or the necklace the Dwarves had given him, despite the warning of the Lord of the Waters. That is his fate. He has never listened. He will never listen. He will make a wilful drowning in the Narog, where a great bridge in another story had been built across the gulf, and Finrod’s treasures, lodged deep in his pockets and wound around his throat and wrists to weigh him down, will sink with his body through the green water and settle cloudily in the silt. There will be stories about that lost gold; about the curse on it. The Nauglamír will be found sunken in the sand and carried once again to Doriath, with less bitterness but no less disaster. 

When Doriath’s survivors arrive in Sirion they will find the Nargothrondrim already there, under Finduilas Gil-gilad their king.

When Gondolin falls, its survivors will find the same encampment and join with joy their sundered Noldor kin. But they will not be the only kin to meet. Tuor, weary with loss and still reeking of fire and brimstone, hands still torn from covering Glorfindel’s body with stones, will see a tall, dark stranger standing on the rampart, frowning bitterly into the sea wind as it lifts his dark hair and makes banners of it. 

“I have a strange feeling,” he will say, “like I should turn around and walk away, as quickly as possible.”

“Oh, that’s just his personality,” Niënor will assure him when they have met and been made known to one another, and he will discover in her and in the glum stranger cousins long lost.

“Oh, _dear_ ,” Idril will say. She is weary and grieving, too, but there is indomitable strength in her, the strength that led her to follow the warnings of the Lord of the Waters when they came to her father, to build a secret way out of Gondolin, to save who could be saved. She has never met Finduilas, her own lost cousin, but she will find in her a welcome mirror. “I really thought we’d left dark, brooding cousins behind.”

They won’t live happily ever after. But many will live that didn’t.


End file.
